By Julie Gedeon
Seattle – Green Marine welcomed more than 300 delegates to its annual conference in Seattle from June 12 to 15 – a sell-out crowd for a second consecutive year.
David Bolduc, Green Marine’s president, welcomed GreenTech 2023 attendees with news about the membership increasing five-fold since the organization’s launch 15 years ago. “I think it reflects how environmental challenges are a priority for our industry and how our program is relevant in addressing those challenges,” he said.
Participants achieved an overall 3.0 average within the program’s one-to-five scale for their 2022 sustainability efforts. “It’s exactly where we want to be,” Mr. Bolduc said. “The program is ambitious but realistic, with the number of participants and newly required performance indicators both more numerous.”
Casey Sixkiller, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regional administrator, noted the EPA’s unprecedented resources to address climate change. “The EPA received more than $35 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act in May 2022, tripling the EPA’s budget,” he said.
The U.S. Congress has instructed the EPA to disperse all the funding by Fall 2024. “The EPA is still the size it was under the Clinton administration, so we’re burning the candle at both ends,” Mr. Sixkiller added.
Stephanie Jones Stebbins, the managing director at the Port of Seattle, suggested the biggest challenge at present stems from the world being so polarized with some people wanting only their goals pursued.
“We’re trying to build economic prosperity and be incredibly sustainable, but when you’re doing two things, you can’t do everything that somebody wants,” she acknowledged. “It’s easy to be criticized even by your own base as you try to bring people along, but you have to try to hear each other, even if it’s a message you don’t like, such as people telling me the way to reduce carbon is to stop ships from operating.”
A few hours later, the point was made when two dozen people entered the hotel calling for a halt to all cruise activity in the Salish Sea and insisting green shipping corridors were impossible to achieve.
(Dreamstime photo of Seattle)
